SimOPD: Relational Knowledge Transfer for On-Policy Distillation

Abstract

A key challenge in on-policy distillation (OPD) is extracting effective supervision from teacher knowledge. Supervision from token probabilities may underutilize internal knowledge, while direct hidden-state matching forces the student to shift to the teacher's feature space and complicates cross-architecture transfer. Inspired by contrastive learning's use of relationships between instances, we propose \textbf{SimOPD} to transfer teacher internal knowledge through response similarities. Specifically, SimOPD uses paired memory banks of student-generated responses to extract supervision from the teacher's internal representations as similarity distributions. The student then matches these distributions within its own representation space, retaining representational freedom and removing the need for cross-model projection. Extensive experiments show that SimOPD improves the overall average over the strongest baselines by up to 2.6 and 3.1 percentage points in same- and cross-architecture settings.